Nando ParradoRezensionen

Told by one of the survivors, this is the story of the plane crash that stranded a rugby team and their families and supporters on a glacier in the high Andes in the 1970s. While most of the book is about what happened there and how any of them managed to live, as well as Roberto and Nando's heroic trek over the mountain to find help, the last part of the book shares what happened to most of the other survivors in the 30 years before this book was written. Nando became a racecar driver, then met his wife and retired to run his family business and raise a family. It was neat that the Prologue and Epilogue were read by Nando himself. The last few tracks contain an interview with him also.

Fascinating story about a plane crash in the Andes where the survivors lived for weeks in the freezing cold with minimal supplies and no easy way out of the dangerously high mountains. The only negative about this book is that the initial chapter provides too much backstory and the last chapter provides too much after story. A good editor would have stuck tight to the plane crash and focused solely on that. So, not the most well written book I've read, but it gives serious insight into what man can and will do to survive.

En octubre de 1972 un avión de las Fuerzas Aéreas uruguayas en el que viaja un equipo de rugby se estrella en los Andes. Solo dieciséis pasajeros sobrevivirán. Las terribles temperaturas los aludes el hambre y el miedo a no ser rescatados irán minando sus esperanzas. Al limite de sus fuerzas Nando Parrado emprenderá con dos compañeros un agónico viaje que los llevara a cruzar los Andes en busca de ayuda. Nando nos narra su propia experiencia con una franqueza loable y con profundo sentimiento.

Both the new intro (2022) and the ending give author Nando Parrado's takeaway lesson from his Andes experience, a lesson (unfortunately) he promotes in his speaking engagements, and it's NOT INSPIRATIONAL at all -- specifically, it's disbelief in God, but belief in love. What a tragic deception with eternal implications! Even so, the book is well-written, adds to the famous account Alive, and gives Christians much to ponder -- but I would not recommend gifting this book to people who are not solid in their faith, those who could be deceived by this damning philosophy.

Really enjoyed this survival story.

An amazing story of loss, love, struggle and survival. Mr. Parrado tells his story of his time on the mountain and how he survived. What make this book different than others is that he is one of the two people who climbed out of the cordillera and hiked 45 miles to safety .

The most breathtakingly harrowing story of survival, and the absolute almost unwavering faith in God and love in the most dire of circumstances. A must read.

Op vrijdag 13 oktober 1972 stort een vliegtuig neer in het Andesgebergte. Aan boord: vijftien leden van een Uruguayaans rugbyteam, hun familieleden en supporters, op weg naar een wedstrijd tegen Chili. Onder de rugbyers ook Nando Parrado, die drie dagen bewusteloos in het ijskoude vliegtuigwrak ligt. Wanneer hij weer wakker wordt, ontdekt hij dat velen het ongeluk niet hebben overleefd, onder wie zijn moeder en zuster. Zij die het wel hebben overleefd, blijken diep in de Andes op een gletsjer in de sneeuw te zitten, zonder voedselvoorraden en enig uitzicht op hulp. Ze vechten tegen de onophoudelijke kou, levensgevaarlijke lawines en uiteindelijk het verschrikkelijke nieuws dat de reddingsoperaties van de buitenwereld zijn gestopt...

A simultaneously crushingly depressing and amazingly inspiring and hopeful book. The writing is precise, and throughout the pages you must remind yourself everything you are reading is a true story. Not light reading, but certainly recommended.

This is the story of the passengers that crashed in the Andes in 1972, of which only 16 were rescued after 10 weeks. Alive by Peris Paul Read explains what happened to the passangers and what was going on on the ground in terms of search and rescue operations and family reactions. Miracle in the Andes by Nando Parrado is the same tale only told from the intimate perspective of one of the survivors 30 years after the crash. These books compliment each other nicely. Alive provides more technical details and discusses events which Parrado was not aware of. Miracle in the Andes discusses the inner thoughts and feelings of Parrado and provides information on the survivors 30 years after the crash. Both books are well written and hearth wrenching, and both manage to discuss the same event without too much repetitiveness.

This is more than a description of a disaster and its survivors. 'Alive' by Piers Paul Reed did that job just a couple of years after the miracle in the Andes, as dubbed by the media. This book, written more than 30 years after the events is much more. Nando Parrado shares his personal, emotional journey from the moment he awoke from a coma, three days after the crash, to trekking an impossible distance in impossible circumstances to find civilization and mount a rescue for the remaining survivors. Add to that, he shares with us how his life developed after he and the other survivors were reborn - what happens after the rescue.

This was truly an amazing book.

A rugby team's airplane crashes in the Andes. The team somehow survives both the crash and the freezing cold -- for 73 days. Amazing. Can’t believe they survived. This book changed my life.

Wow! I read Alive when it was first published, but was not prepared for how viscerally I would respond to THIS memoir. Parrado lays bare his soul in describing his (and his teammates) ordeal.

This is a familiar story that was related in Alive by Piers Paul Read and in a movie of the same title, about a plane chartered by a rugby team in 1972 that went down on one of the highest peaks of the Andes, leaving many of the passengers injured but alive. Parrado was one of those passengers. This is his story. When they heard news on a radio that the search had been called off, he and others decided they had to climb out of the mountains if they were to have any chance of survival. Parrado and another young man made a heroic, miraculous trek to reach help. The sensational news was they they had (necessarily) resorted to cannibalism, but although that had been a difficult decision, it was not the most horrific they had suffered. The frigid temperatures, an avalanche that killed eight and left the fuselage, their only shelter, buried, the terrible injuries, the lack of everything they needed, was considerably worse.

The biographical details at the beginning allows the reader to relate so much more to the disaster by getting to know some of the individuals. Also appreciated was the final update on the survivors. A few years ago I saw a movie of the story. Parrado's personal account delivered a more powerful account of the despair, desolation, helplessness and the agonizing trek out.

What courage, a well written biography of an appalling situation to find themselves in. The choices that they had to make must have been heart rending

Con este libro se completan todos las dudas que podrían haber quedado, sobre lo que se sabia de la tragedia de los andes , en un extraordinario relato contado por el protagonista de los hechos.

9 hours, 45 minutes: The first disc, ( total of 8 cds ) was so boring I could not bear to listen to the rest. The first paragraph was good.... then it went on and on and on and on with background of his family. I lost interest and stopped listening. Maybe someone who listened to the whole book would have another opinion.

1974's Alive by Piers Paul Reid is one of my all-time favorite books. The tone in that one had just the right amount of everything in order to convey the scope and aftermath of that fateful 1972 plane crash in the Andes Mountains. So when I learned that Nando Parrado himself, one of the heroic survivors, was writing a memoir, I was skeptical but still curious. Would his retelling offer a profound new insight to the tragedy? Or would this be another instance of should've left well-enough alone? Fortunately, it's the former.

If you're a fan of the Piers Paul Reid book, or heck, even the 1992 movie, then I recommend this one.½

Even in the minds of the co-authors, this book is overshadowed by another, Piers Paul Read's Alive, which told this story of a plane crash and the months that followed in the Andes using interviews of the survivors. Nando Parrado, one of those survivors called Alive a "magnificent book" and said he had not tried to tell his own story for 30 years because he felt that book already covered "all the public needed to know." Vince Rause in his acknowledgments admitted wondering if another book was necessary since Alive "told that story in such exhaustive detail, and with such definitive scope and power." I read Alive decades ago--it was assigned reading in high school, and it made an indelible impression. There was little in this account that was a surprise to me, because I remembered so many of the details of that other book, and I'd certainly say if you're going to read only one account of this story, it should be that one--it's wonderfully and sensitively written.

But Rouse said he thought another account would be worthwhile if Parrado was really willing to open up and take you back on that mountain and help you think what he thought and felt what he felt and take you along on the spiritual and physical journey he took, and in that I think it succeeds wonderfully. In fact, at certain points I was even moved close to tears, and that isn't easy. Alive emphasized the importance of their shared faith in the ordeal they underwent. There were 45 passengers and crew on that plane, and within a week there were only 27 survivors with all the food running out. To stay alive, those remaining had to resort to eating the bodies of the dead. To allow themselves to do that, some clung to their faith, even trying to see their taking nourishment from their dead as a form of communion.

It was different for Parrado, who would take his survival into his own hands and with one companion make a near impossible climb over the mountain to go get help. Certainly, if there was one survivor of that ordeal whose story I'd want to know, it's his--because he didn't just wait to die. For him in the end the miracle of the Andes wasn't from God. He wrote that he found the "opposite of death is not mere living... courage or faith or human will." It's love. In the end, it was his love for the family that would be grieving for him that pushed him to endure. Parrado's account of the psychology of survival reminded me of nothing so much of accounts I've read of survival in concentration camps--which went well beyond the mere physical. This doesn't to my mind replace Alive, but it's a book well worth having together with it on your shelf.

This was a great read. Nando Parrado does a fabulous job of evoking the emotions that he was going through as he struggled to survive in the harshest conditions that I can imagine anyone surviving in. In the book, he describes the events from the plane crash on, drawing on the history of the people he is talking about to help the reader gain context for peoples actions.

I'd recommend this book to anyone who enjoys books about survival or about overcoming huge obstacles to accomplish what you need to do.

Leer "Viven" supuso una experiencia enriquecedora. Me sentí próxima a la desgracia de las víctimas del terrible accidente aéreo de los Andes. Me conmovió, a pesar de no ser creyente y sentir rechazo hacia cualquier tipo de devoción ciega, el consuelo que aquellos hombres y mujer (sólo una sobrevivió al accidente, y un alud posterior acabó con su vida antes del rescate final) hallaron en la idea de Dios, y también en el amor por sus familias.
Pero leer este libro, explicado por uno de los supervivientes más célebres, Nando Parrado (uno de los dos que llevaron a cabo la expedición que finalmente salvó la vida de 15 de los accidentados), ha sido otro tema. Él me ha hecho sentir no sólo el frío, el vacío y la desesperación, sino encontrar a Dios… Pero no de una manera misericordiosa, ni tan sólo de una manera simbólica. Nando estuvo atrapado en medio de aquellas montañas, y lo que vio allí, lo que lo envolvió, le hizo comprender una serie de verdades. Entre ellas, que ese paraje formaba parte de un espectáculo natural cuya grandeza residía en que ningún humano podía haberlo “disfrutado” hasta ese momento… y de hecho, precisamente eso carecía de importancia. Porque lo que Nando aprendió fue que los seres humanos somos una mota en un universo que ha amanecido y anochecido durante millones de años sin que nuestra presencia haya supuesto ningún cambio. Ahí está Dios: es esa fuerza cósmica que ha creado un mundo que nos queda grande.
Y también aprendió otra cosa allá arriba: que la muerte es la constante. Él pensaba que la vida era lo real y que la muerte tan sólo era el final de la vida. Pero allí comprendió que la muerte es la base, la constante de la realidad, y que nuestra vida sólo es una casualidad que, precisamente por eso, es un tesoro. El contrario de la muerte no es la vida: es el amor, ese motor que nos hace seguir adelante a pesar de tenerlo todo en contra. Por eso luchó y por eso ganó.
Por eso su historia me ha llegado tan adentro. Porque las historias de supervivencia me recuerdan que yo estoy viva y me dan el toque de atención que necesito por no valorarlo lo suficiente.

Gripping and detailed journey of Nando and comrades. This book really gets you in the head of the narrator and you feel his emotion through his words. HIGHLY recommend for ages 14 and up.

In 1973, just a year after the fateful crash in the Andes, Piers Paul Read wrote the now epic account of this survivors' story, Alive. Read's story is universally acclaimed as a masterful account of this epic tale of cannibalism and the power of human will. It's a third person account and it has taken 30 years for one of the sixteen survivors to tell their memoir. This task was finally assumed by Nando Parrado, one of the two men who left the relative security of the plane's fuselage to scale the mighty Andes mountain in search of a rescuer. He recounts in vivid detail and brutal honesty his personal thoughts and feelings of hunger, thirst, despair, hope, fear, dread, and every motion in between. This first person account is vivid, riveting, and a page turner, even if you have read Alive and know the story. It's spiritual and philosophical too. He concludes that love is what saved him and exhorts readers to live a life of love and to truly live each moment. I was really touched by Parrado's unflinching introspection and modesty and his desire to impart hard earned lessons to us all.

If you’ve never read Alive by Piers Paul Read or even if you have read that book, it would be so well worth your time to read Miracle in the Andes, the first person narrative of Nando Parrado’s survival of a plane crash in the Andes, the extraordinarily high mountain range of South America. The story is compelling, of course, but this memoir, written together with Vince Rouse, provides a heartbreaking recollection of what it feels like to be so close to death yet desire, with all one’s heart, not to die despite overwhelming odds against survival.

Even though I knew details of Parrado’s story, reading this book never semed like a “rerun”. I was there in those frigid mountains with him all the way. I suffered with him, both physically and emotionally. I found it amazing that Parrado and Rause could together write a book which felt as if it happened just yesterday although this accident occurred in 1972. In the end, it was rewarding to learn that the survivors have thrived in the many years following their plane accident. Their survival in the Andes was truly a miracle.